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When a Child’s Anxieties Need Sorting

MISSION Dr. Harold Koplewicz at Child Mind Institute, his children's mental health center on Park Avenue.Credit
Robert Caplin for The New York Times

WHEN the 10-year-old son of Brooke Garber Neidich, a chairwoman at the Whitney Museum, was having difficulty in school, there was only one person who was able to give him a proper diagnosis: Dr. Harold Koplewicz.

When Debra G. Perelman, a daughter of the Revlon chairman Ronald O. Perelman, wanted to address her young daughter’s social anxiety, there was just one man she called: Dr. Harold Koplewicz.

And when the financier Marc Bell, was concerned about his twins’ mental health, he called (you guessed it) Dr. Harold Koplewicz.

“He basically saved my kids,” Mr. Bell said.

Just who is this man, whom people from as far away as Dubai entrust with their children’s psyches; whose hourly rate can be as high as $1,000 (three to four times that of the average Manhattan therapist); and whose friends include the former New Jersey governor Jon S. Corzine and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton?

“I know that some people see him as a self-promoter, but I don’t see him that way,” said Dr. Alan Ravitz, a colleague. “Harold really wants to do something meaningful for children, which is kind of an amazing thing.”

Though Dr. Koplewicz admitted a knack for schmoozing (“I’m very good at fund-raising,” he said), his main mission in life, he contended, is to remove any stigma from mental illness among children and teenagers, make it merely something to be managed and overcome as it was with dyslexia or attention deficit disorder before it.

“People think of child psychiatry as playing with kids on the floor,” Dr. Koplewicz, 58, said recently at his office at the Child Mind Institute, his new children’s mental health care treatment center on Park Avenue and 56th Street. “We need to educate them and change the way they think about childhood psychiatric illnesses, so the shame goes away and it improves access to care.” According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 15 million children in the United States suffer from some kind of psychiatric disorder, like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, but about 80 percent never get help. And the illnesses tend to be discussed in hushed tones. “If your child has a rash, for instance, you can call up your friend to talk about a dermatologist, but it would be very rare to call up your friend and say my child has a mental health issue and could you recommend a doctor for me,” said Ms. Perelman, vice chairwoman of the Child Mind Institute.

That is precisely what the silver-haired, mustached Dr. Koplewicz (he eerily resembles the film critic Joel Siegel) is trying to change, with the help of his well-heeled supporters.

He traced his interest in the field to his own childhood. He was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a son of Holocaust survivors. His father, who died last year, had been in multiple concentration camps, Dr. Koplewicz said, and was a participant in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

“My father was very clear that what you carry in your head means everything,” said Dr. Koplewicz, who is married to Linda Sirow, an artist and art teacher at Dalton. They have three sons in their 20s and live on the Upper East Side. “He was very keen on my becoming a physician.”

At age 12, young Harold developed a bleeding disorder called idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. The doctors initially thought it was leukemia, and he had to take steroids. “I was so heavy at my bar mitzvah that no one recognized me,” he said with a rueful laugh.

He developed a close relationship with his doctors, some of whom he stayed in contact with through adulthood. One even helped him with his medical school applications. At the Albert Einstein School of Medicine he settled on pediatrics, but soon became bored with it: “The mothers were the ones you took care of,” he said. He found neurology and psychiatry much more interesting.

In 1996, Dr. Koplewicz became the chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at New York University Medical Center (now the N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center), and a year later founded the N.Y.U. Child Study Center, where he remained for 12 years. Over the course of his tenure he, along with Ms. Garber Neidich, who was chairwoman of the board (and now holds that position at Child Mind Institute), raised about $142 million for the N.Y.U. Child Center, he said.

In 2009, Dr. Koplewicz left N.Y.U. to start the Child Mind Institute, which has been operating since last November, but which officially opened May 3. The 24,000-square-foot office is equipped with video and computer equipment, a built-in TV studio and the latest in brain imaging technology. Its Web site, childmind.org, is edited by Caroline Miller, the former editor of New York magazine; there are 14 clinicians on staff.

According to Dr. Koplewicz, once he announced his resignation, N.Y.U. forbade him from entering his office and it pushed out professors who had said they wanted to join him at Child Mind Institute.

One of these was Dr. Ravitz, a former professor of child and adolescent mental health studies program at the university. “When I decided to come to the C.M.I., I was told by the Child Study Center that I could go into private practice and continue to teach, or could stay at the Child Study Center and continue to teach, but that if I went to C.M.I. I could not teach at N.Y.U.,” said Dr. Ravitz, the senior director of forensic psychiatry at Child Mind Institute. “I said I wished they would reconsider their decision, and they basically said, ‘Sorry, we can’t do it.’ ”

Twelve other N.Y.U. professors and the majority of the Child Study Center’s board of directors, which included not just Ms. Garber Neidich and her husband, Daniel, but also the Tribeca Film Festival founders Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff; Anne McNulty, managing partner of JBK Partners; and Claude Wasserstein, an ex-wife of the financier Bruce Wasserstein, also followed Dr. Koplewicz to the Child Mind Institute.

“Everybody who came with him took a chance — they had to start all over again,” Dr. Ravitz said. “It was scary. But I see Harold as an entirely decent, honorable, honest human being. The guy’s a force of nature.”

It would appear the institution has lost an expert networker. As vice dean of external affairs for the N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center, Dr. Koplewicz helped raise $509 million in the fiscal year 2007-8, he said. Last December, the Child Mind Institute gave an inaugural gala at Cipriani, raking in $5.5 million. Guests included Mr. Corzine, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn, Robert De Niro, Grace Hightower and the billionaire J. Christopher Flowers.

Indeed, Dr. Koplewicz takes his fund-raising so seriously that he sees very few patients himself, which is how he explained his high rates (he will occasionally work pro bono, and other clinicians at the center offer sliding scales). Though the institute does not accept insurance, approximately 20 percent of patients receive financial aid or are charged fees as low as $50, according to the organization.

And thus far it has loyal support from former clients. Mr. Corzine met Dr. Koplewicz in the early 1990s, when Dr. Koplewicz treated Mr. Corzine’s children. Since that time, Mr. Corzine has given $6 million to the N.Y.U. Child Study Center, and $1 million to the Child Mind Institute, he said. “So many of the problems we see broadly in this world flow from the challenges that children’s mental health, as well as adult mental health, bring to bear,” Mr. Corzine said. “People want to support the center to help kids from inner cities who need treatment.”

Ms. Garber Neidich agreed. “Harold could make so much more money in private practice,” she said. “He does this because he believes in it.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 5, 2011, on page ST10 of the New York edition with the headline: When a Child’s Anxieties Need Sorting. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe